Sonja Kehler grew up in the German Democratic Republic and started
her career as an actress who also landed roles that required singing.
She played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady for a long time
and was also selected for Brecht roles. Towards the end of the
1960s she gradually left the theatre to concentrate on a career
as a solo artist – also internationally. Hers was a typical Brechtian
voice: flexible, unsentimental, excellent enunciation, a bit distanced
in approach. The ageing Lotte Lenya’s ‘speak-song’ had become
a kind of norm and Sonja Kehler belongs to that school, as does
the roughly ten years older Gisela May. Sonja Kehler turned 75
in February this year and this disc with recordings from the 1970s
was issued to coincide with her birthday as a tribute to a great
artist.

Bertold Brecht
and Kurt Weill are for many, I suppose, the inseparable radar
couple in German music theatre. In fact their collaboration
was short-lived. On the other hand, Dessau and especially
Eisler worked with him for many years. Eisler chalked up nearly
thirty years collaboration with Brecht There is, no doubt,
a kinship between the three composers: in the straightforward
approach, a kind of aggression, the rhythmic patterns, the
often blunt ends, the adaptation of elements from jazz and
popular music. But whereas Weill has a melodic directness
that he was to hone and develop when he moved to the USA to
fit into mainstream popular songs and Broadway musical theatre,
both Eisler and Dessau are bolder, more experimental, drawing
on sometimes harsh harmonies and melodic material based on
speech. In particular Paul Dessau was quite avant-garde. The
differences can generally be heard both in the theatre songs
and the Lieder, where Eisler is sometimes ingratiatingly catchy,
Dessau is more evasive. What they have in common is the gift
to let Brecht’s lyrics speak – the melodies are not ends in
themselves. They fit Brecht’s aesthetics: the epic theatre,
the Verfremdungseffekt. This doesn’t imply that there
is any kind of monotony. Within the concept there is variation
aplenty. Among my personal favourites I would single out the
melodically inventive songs from Herr Puntila … (Eisler)
and Dessau’s Lied der Mutter Courage, where we hear
soldiers marching relentlessly.

The Lieder, many
of them quite short, are charmingly jazzy (tr. 17), catchy
Schlager-melodies (tr. 18) or intimate ballads (tr. 24). Not
all of them are Brecht settings. Dessau’s Tierverse
are amusing miniatures and each of them starts like a fairy-tale:
Es war einmal … One of them, Das Pferd (The
Horse), was composed specifically for Sonja Kehler.

The accompaniments
are varied, spanning from simple guitar-chords to full ensemble
with winds and percussion, often with witty or illustrative
instrumental solos. The arrangements are by Manfred Grabs
and Helge Jung. The sound quality is excellent with wide stereo
spread. The booklet has an interview with Sonja Kehler but
unfortunately no sung texts. The message is central and even
though Kehler’s articulation is spotless non-German natives
at least would have been greatly helped by the printed words.

Whether this is
a disc with universal appeal is debatable. The texts are political,
even controversially so to some listeners, but provided one
accepts Brecht’s point of view it is hard to imagine a better
advocate for these songs than Sonja Kehler. A timely issue.
Many Happy Returns of the Day!

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